Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU.UUCP (02/20/87)
Really-From: rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (Mais, ou sont les neiges d'antan?) In the interests of avoiding miles of pain and heartbreak to the scads and wads of you who have so patiently and calmly sat through the "whatisart" bit before, I'll keep it short. I'm adding this mostly to congratulate Doug for finally adopting what I think is a pretty well-thought-out opinion, and to point him toward the *next* logical area of consideration for his aesthetic. Then I'll go back to my real work.... >I would agree that a work of art cannot be separated from its cultural >context and still understood, but I maintain that there are geniuses >who are able to absorb something from their culture and then using >what they have absorbed are able to synthesize something that is >emotionally or intellectually powerful to a significant portion of >their culture. I tend to shy away from the term "genius" at all. While it's etymologically pretty harmless (it appears initially to refer to a peculiar or identifying characteristic without all the baggage added to it in the Romantic aesthetic-which might be thought of as a modification of the old Religiously-oriented notion that one was specially talented or chosen by [insert diety here] as a distinctive channel for X in an era which replaced the Divine with the Rational, and Chosenness with Genius), but the excess baggage tends to suggest that genius X would be recognized as a genius *out* of their cultural context. that this act of synthesis is somehow very personal (both in content and reception of a work) and relatively unconstrained by the factors that Doug alludes to earlier as "context." What I'd add to Doug's view is that the notion of "synthesis" suggests to me that Doug believes that the "rules" by which the status of artists, the relative importance ascribed to various kinds of human work in a cultural context, and the mutability and continuity/discontinuity of the critical and cultural concensus from age to age somehow allow us to confidently point out a genius with something approaching relative certainty. I disagree on this point: I believe that the *best* you can hope for is the broadest concensus possible (remembering that that concensus itself represents a large number of compromises among the agreeing parties rather than a monolithic value judgement), and to combine that with an admission that admits the provisionality of such a concensus. The collection of that concensus over time (the institution of Art. The ones who like Mozart, Brahms, Howlin' Wolf, and early Todd Rundgren) provides a rich field for investigation of the way in which a group of persons thought/think about themselves and the links they forge with their past and their presence (cf Foucalt's "the Archaelogy of Knowledge"), but I don't think it can be said to constitute anything other than a provisional concensus. Further, I think that the only persons/groups who would characteristically claim an "objective" basis for those same judgements are serving some other agenda-which they are free to pursue implicitly or explicitly. It is the *claim* of objectivity that is the warning flag. Such claims tend in my experience to bunch together with other very non-aesthetic claims. That clump of value judgements shared among a group can become the currency of power-as such, they are used to buy guns and buy drinks all around. There. I finished this whole mass of stuff off with a non sequitur. So I'm not all that serious after all. Sorry if I bothered the lot of you, but this is important stuff to me. There's *my* bias. -- i'm not alive in the darkness/more like a shadow on the lungs/i'll balance here on the edge of anger/standing here with an empty page/sooner or later i'll start receiving/i've been standing here for days/we shake it up/and we break it down. Gregory Taylor/ ...{nicmad or uwvax}!astroatc!gtaylor